Green

"Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises." - Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Green is everywhere. It’s the most common color in the natural world. It’s the color we associate with money, the environment, and aliens, and it’s the color of revitalization and rebirth. It also carries negative connotations, as with envy, greed, nausea, and poison. The green we see in nature is the color of of chlorophyll, the "magic" substance that converts sunlight to energy, and thus sustains almost all life on earth.

Kermit the Frog famously declared that "It isn't easy being green", but we think it shouldn't be too hard to find a way to make green the primary compositional element in your photos. Green landscapes are almost too easy - unless you can find a new point of view. Trees, plants of all kinds, insects, too. The human environment is rife with green, from lights to painted signs to vehicles; the literal possibilities are nearly endless. The figurative possibilities are nearly endless as well, so see if you can use green to evoke an emotion, a feeling, a sensation.

For this exhibition we're looking for images that creatively explore greenness, green in all its many guises. We're inviting you to color outside the lines… as long as you're coloring in green.

Juror's Statement:

There were a lot of really solid works to choose from which made my job hard, but obviously there were several that really touched me and captured the word, “green” in a less conventional and expected manner. These were the images I was hunting for and what I ended up being most drawn to. In a contest like this you want to make sure your submission(s) stand out from the pack. There was a superabundance of leaves, tress, landscape shots with no other intriguing elements happening within the frame, and over photoshopped (meaning the saturation and/or sharpening was much too prevalent) images of chipped green paint on walls and the like. And, while some of these were well composed or had elements I liked about them, there were just too many of these same images.

A cool tip that I learned long ago and follow to this day goes like this: if you're out shooting and you see something you want to capture, stop and ask yourself, “have I seen a photo like this before?” If so, don’t shoot it and if you must, shoot it from a completely particular and individualistic perspective. Make it your own! This is the only way you will learn how to grow and evolve with your work and start producing photographs that are distinct to you and your vision as an artist. Furthermore- this is how you will eventually be able to submit to these kinds of contests and ensure that your photos stand out from the rest.

In the end, my final selections came easily. I picked the strongest image for 1st place but the honorable mentions were all a very close second. These images were all incredibly powerful and aberrant. Great submissions overall. It was pleasure getting the opportunity to view so much good work from so many different photographers.

We offer free matting and framing of accepted entries for the duration of each of our exhibition, subject to standard sizes. Photographers set their own prices if they wish to sell their work and retain all rights to their photographs.

Juror: Sarah Elise Abramson

Young and passionately productive, Sarah Elise Abramson writes a monthly column for American Art Collector magazine as well as for Culture magazine. She has curated numerous exhibitions in the Los Angles area while studying her craft as a photographer under Susan Worsham, Taso Papadakis, David LaChapelle, and others. After a three year residency at Angel Gates Cultural Center, her accomplishments have been featured in multiple publications including the Huffington Post, Monster Children, Beautiful Bizarre magazine, Coachella Magazine, and The Photographic Journal. She has exhibited at The Louvre, SOMarts, The Vex, The Egan Gallery, Gregorio Escalante Gallery, BG Gallery, The Arsenal of Venice in Italy, Jamie Brooks Gallery, The Eventi Hotel Big Screen Plaza in New York, to name a few. Abramson is additionally the curator and editor-in-chief of Slow Toast, an annual independent art publication.

In her own work, Abramson resides at the intersection of poetic and unsettling, creepy and beautiful, subversive and classically romantic. Her work is ethereal, demonstrating an inquisitive and appreciative love for nature, eccentric characters, and discarded objects that serve as windows into dreamlike visions of other people's lives. Abramson often assigns meaning to the mysterious productions of the human psyche through the mode of photography, offering us a view into a normally invisible and n=magical realm that gets lost in our mundane affairs.